by Texas
There was no sensible reason why she should lend this grotesque man the money he wanted, but there was an overpowering sentimental one. He had carved the nose she wore and which had made such a difference in her life, and although their relationship had been a miserable one, she loved hun for that one gesture She had known great terror in her life, and little love apart from that which her daydreaming husband had given so freely, so she cherished every manifestation made in her behalf. Floyd was her son, and at one accidental point in his miserable life he had loved her. She would lend him the money.
But life had made her a wily woman, so before she relinquished her funds she drove a bargain. When he asked her 'What interest 7 ' she said 'None,' and he thanked her. Then she added: 'But I do want five thousand more acres for my Longhorns,' and since he was in the perilous position of having to accept any terms in order to get his gambling money, he said: 'Promised,' and she asked: 'Fenced in?' and he had to reply: 'Yes.'
However, when they went out to inspect the land she had thus acquired for her chosen animals, she saw that the proposed rig was going to stand very close to the statue commemorating the two lovers, and Floyd expected her to raise the devil. Instead she stood quietly and looked at the unassembled derrick. 'How appropriate,' she said. 'They lived in turbulence. Better than most, they'll adjust to an oil boom ... if we get one. I'm sure they hope you hit, Flovd. I do.'
And so with his mother's money Rusk kept his gamble alive.
Then began the days of anxiety. Even with Emma's contribution the partnership lacked enough funds to start drilling its third well, the one that seemed likely to produce, and this meant that the ill-assorted team—gross, surly Floyd and tenacious, ratlike Dewey—faced double disasters. The leases on the very promising land, which they had taken for only one year, were about to run out, and the drilling crew was eager to move east. The partners knew they had less than two months to resolve these problems. The nature of a Texas oil lease was this: if a lease expired on 30 June 1923, as these did, the holder had a right to start drilling at his choice of time up to one minute before midnight on the thirtieth. If he did not or could not start, the lease lapsed and could be resold to some other wildcatter. But if the holder did start his drilling within his time allowance, the full provisions of the lease came into effect and prevailed for centuries to come. So each of the partners, in his own way, began to scrounge around for additional funds.
Rusk stayed in Larkin, badgering everyone, begging them to lend him money, and he was embittered when his Ku Klux Klan compatriots turned him down. Some did so out of conviction, because they felt it was his greed that had brought the ten oil-field roughnecks, with their devil-driven ways, into Larkin. But most rejected him because they saw him to be a burly, aggressive, overbearing man who deserved to get his comeuppance.
Kimbro, on the other hand, traveled widely, still hoping to find the speculator who would grubstake him for the big attack on the hidden field. He would go anywhere, consult with anyone, and offer almost any kind of inducement: 'Let me have the money, less than a year, ten-percent interest, and I'll give you one-thirty-second of my participation.' He offered one-sixteenth, even one-eighth, but found no takers.
When he returned to Larkin in April 1923, he was almost a defeated man, but because he was a born wildcatter he could not let anyone see his despair. Each morning when he was in town he repaired to the greasy cafe where the oilmen who had begun to infiltrate the area assembled to make their big boasts, and he knew it was essential that they see him at the height of his confidence: 'We expect to start Number Three any day now. Big investors from Tulsa, you know.' But each day that passed brought the partnership closer to collapse.
Now the serious gambling started, the reckless dealing away of percentages. One morning Floyd rushed to the cafe, took Dewey into the men's room, and almost wept: The drilling crew is hauling their rig back to Jacksboro.'
'We can't let them do that. Once they get off our land, we'll never get them back,' so the partners, smiling broadly as if they had concluded some big deal in the toilet, walked casually through the cafe, nodding to the oilmen, then dashed out to the rig.
Rusk had been right, the men were starting to dismantle it prior to mounting it on trucks, but when Dewey cried: 'Wait! We'll give you one-sixteenth of our seven-eighths,' they agreed to take the chance, for they, too, had seen the Strawn signs.
Later Rusk asked: 'Could we afford to give so much?' and Dewey explained the wildcatter's philosophy: 'If the well proves dry, who gives a damn what percentage they have? And if it comes in big, like I know it will, who cares if they have their share?'
A week before the termination of the leases the partners still had insufficient funds to drill their well, but now Kimbro heard from two of his A&M gamblers who wanted to get in on the action, but to get their money he had to give away one-eighth of his share to the first friend, one-sixteenth to the other—and the final owner-
ship of the well became so fractionized that the partners could scarcely untangle the proportions.
Three days before the leases expired, scandal struck the operation, for the two A&M men, always a canny lot, heard the rumor that their old buddy Dewey Kimbro had pulled an oil-field sting on them, and they rode into town ready to tear him apart: 'He sold two hundred percent of his well. Peddled it all over East Texas.'
'What's that mean?' the Larkin men asked.
'Don't you see? If he drills dry, and he's already done so twice, he owes us nothing. He's collected twice, spends about one-quarter of the total, and goes off laughing with our dough.'
They drove out to the proposed drilling site at the tank to challenge Kimbro, but when they found him hiking back and forth over the rolling terrain, trying to settle upon the exact spot for his final well, they found him honestly engaged in trying to find oil. He had not sold two hundred percent of what he knew was going to be a dry well; he was gambling his entire resources upon one lucky strike, and as Texas gamblers, they were satisfied to be sharing in his risk.
Two days before the lapse of their leases, Rusk and Kimbro finally got a break. An Oklahoma wildcatting outfit had figured that if Dewey Kimbro, once of Humble and Gulf, thought there was oil in the Larkin area, it was a good location in which to take a flier. They had drilled a well just to the east of Rusk #1, gambling that the suspected oil lay in that direction and not toward the tank. These men, of course, could not know that Dewey had struck indications to the west, so down they went to five thousand feet, missing the field entirely and producing nothing but a very dry well, whose failure they announced on June 28.
This helped Kimbro in two ways: it verified his hunch that the field did not lie to the east of Rusk # 1, and it so disheartened the Larkin landowners—three test holes, three buckets of dust—that they became determined to offload their worthless leases throughout the entire area. In a paroxysm of energy, Dewey shouted at Rusk and his two A&M buddies: 'Now's the time to pick up every damned lease in the district. My God, won't somebody lend me ten thousand dollars?' Faced by total disaster if his Rusk # 3 did not come in, he spent two days committing his last penny to his belief that he would strike it rich this time. By dint of telegrams, telephone calls and the most ardent personal appeals to speculators in the Larkin-Jacksboro-Fort Griffin area, he put together a substantial kitty, which he spent on leases that encapsulated the field.
At six in the morning of 30 June 1923, Dewey Kimbro appeared at the oilmen's cafe with a smile so confident and casual that a
stranger might think he was about to start a well with the full weight of Gulf Oil behind him, and when Floyd Rusk came in, sweating like a pig, Dewey caught him by the wrist and whispered: 'Dry your face,' for he, Dewey, had been in such perilous situations before; Rusk had not.
When they rode out to the field, with Dewey commenting on the brightness of this summer's day, Rusk was vaguely aware that if Rusk # 3 did strike oil profits would be divided in this typically Texan way, the intricate details of which had been
worked out by lawyers and filed in long legal documents:
205078
1 000001
Thus the second A&M investor was entitled to 7 s X 15 i6 x Va X V b of the whole, or ,o y 8 i<*2 (012817). which meant that every time the well produced $100,000, he received S12H! "4 for as long as the well operated
On an August afternoon in 1923 a hanger-on who had watched the drilling of Rusk # 3 as he would a baseball game, came riding back to Larkin in his Ford, screaming: They got oil!'
The citizens, hoping to see a great gusher sprouting from the plains, sped out to the tank, where, on its flank, hardened men were dancing and crying and slapping each other with oil-splattered hands. They did not have a gusher; the famous field at Larkin did not contain either the magnitude or the subterranean pressure to provide that kind of spectacular exhibition, but Dewey Kimbro. seeing the oil appear and making such guesses as he could or
fragmentary evidence, said: 'Could be a hundred and ten barrels a day, for years to come.'
He was right. The Larkin Field, as it came to be known, was going to be a slow, steady producer. Spacious in extent but not very deep, it was the kind of field that would allow wells to be dug almost anywhere inside its limits with the sober assurance that at around three thousand feet in the Strawn Sand a modest amount of oil would be forthcoming, year after year after year.
'And the glory of it is,' Kimbro told Rusk when they were back home at midnight, 'we know pretty well the definition of the field. Our first dry well to the east plus the dry Oklahoma wildcatter showed us where it ends in that direction. Our dry Number Two proved where it ends in the west. What we don't know is how far north and south.'
'Forever,' Rusk said, 'and by God, we control it all.' For one glorious moment these two men who had once wanted to kill each other danced in the darkened kitchen.
In the early fall of 1923, Larkin became the hottest boom town in Texas, with oilmen from all parts of America streaming in to try their luck at the far perimeters of the undefined field. To a stranger, the Larkin Field did not look like a typical oil site, because as soon as a well was dug, the towering pyramidal structure that meant oil to the layman was quickly moved to some other location for more drilling. The actual pumping of oil from deep below the surface was turned over to an unromantic donkey engine, a small low-slung affair which could barely be seen from a distance. The donkey, powered by gasoline, worked its relatively short arm up and down incessantly, and from it poured the oil which was turning Larkin gamblers into millionaires.
Companies big and little rushed in their landmen to acquire leases, and wherever they turned they found themselves confronted by Floyd Rusk, who either owned the land, controlled the leases, or had power of attorney for handling the leases owned by his partner, Dewey Kimbro.
It was now that Rusk demonstrated both his devious managerial skill and his untamed voraciousness, for he saw quickly that he and Kimbro controlled far more land than they could ever drill. And if they didn't act quickly, they would lose certain of their short-term leases outright and then watch as other men's wells sucked out the oil from under their long-term ones. As if he had been in the business for generations, Rusk dealt out his leases to the major companies, scattering them so they would do his own holdings the
most good, and using the money he obtained from them for the drilling of his own additional wells.
'A man could make a good livin',' he told Kimbro, 'just buying' and sellin' leases and never drillin' an inch into the ground. Let some other dumb bastard do the hard work.'
Now a fundamental difference between the two partners surfaced. Kimbro loved oil itself, the endless search, even the heartbreaking failures, the lucky hit, the bringing of oil to the surface, while Rusk's interest blossomed only when the bubbling oil came into his actual possession. He reveled in the tricky deals, the exploitation, the pyramiding of the wealth that oil provided.
If left alone, Kimbro would have ranged over all of Texas, identifying new fields, bringing them to fruition, and then turning them over to the managerial care of Floyd Rusk; his only interest in the money which his wells produced was that it enabled him to search for others. However, under Rusk's canny leadership, Kimbro was kept close to the Larkin Field, which the partners manipulated as if it were some giant poker game, and more than one major company entered into its files a recommendation that Floyd Rusk be either shot or placed on the board of directors: 'That son-of-a-bitch knows oil.'
They were only partly right, for if Rusk quickly mastered the intricacies of dealing in leases, he never could visualize the lake of oil which lay hidden under his ranch and under the leases he controlled. Kimbro was powerless to explain that an oil field was one of the most delicately balanced marvels of nature: 'Floyd, goddamnit, our field has a limited life. The pressure which delivers the oil to us must be maintained.'
Kimbro drew maps of the underground reservoir, showing Floyd how the entrapment by rocks kept the lake of oil in position, and how water and gas provided the pressure which enabled the drillers to bring it to the surface: 'Destroy that pressure, or dissipate it, and you can lose your field.'
He astounded Rusk by predicting that if wells continued to be dug so promiscuously at Larkin, the pressure would be drawn off at so many random sites that only about ten percent of the oil locked underground would ever be recovered, and when Rusk did finally understand this, it had exactly the opposite result from what Kimbro had intended.
'By God, if it's limited, let's get ours now.'
So he dug numerous wells on his own property, producing vastly more raw petroleum than could be marketed, and on his better leases he encouraged everyone else to do the same, until Larkin fairly groaned with oil. When all the fuel lines were jammed and
the open earthen pits were rotting with the dark stuff, whose volatile oils were thus dissipated, he watched as the price dropped from a dollar a barrel to the appalling figure of ten cents, and even then he could not comprehend the need for more disciplined measures. Like a true Texan he bellowed: 'We don't want no government interference. We found this field. We developed it, and by God, we'll work it our way.'
His wasteful procedure was not preposterous, so far as he was concerned, because he had varied ways to multiply his wealth He owned thirty-three wells outright; he shared a seventy-five-percent interest in nineteen others; and he received huge yearly rentals for leases which the big companies held on the acreage he could not himself develop. By the close of that first year he was a millionaire four times over, with every prospect of doubling and then redoubling and then quadrupling.
His tremendous good luck had little effect upon him personally, for he rarely spent money on himself beyond the sheerest necessities. He still moved his huge bulk about the oil fields in a Ford truck; he wore the same rancher's outfit, the same battered Stetson, the same cheapest-line General Quimper boots. At the morning breakfasts in the cafe, which now had thirty tables filled with oilmen, he never picked up the checks at his corner unless he had specifically invited someone to eat with him, which he did infrequently. He gave no money to the Baptist church, none to the school, none to the hospital. In fact, he attended only spasmodically to his income and would have been unable to tell anyone how much he had accumulated.
He did buy three good bulls, for in Texas, oil and ranching enjoyed a symbiotic relationship which no Northern oilman ever understood. If you took a thousand Texas oil wells, you could be sure that nine hundred were drilled so that some dreaming man without a dime could buy himself a ranch, for it was said in the business: 'Ain't nothin' makes a steer grow better than good pasturage, a pinch of phosphorus in the soil, and freedom to scratch hisself on an oil derrick.'
With his first big check from Gulf for his leases, he purchased an additional five thousand acres for his ranch, and with his second check, he drove north to meet with Paul Yeager: 'I think my father made a mistake promisin' you this land, and I made a bigger mistake transferrin' it to you legal. Paul, I want to buy it back
. Name your price.'
'I'm not selling.'
'Paul, you got no mineral rights. You got no leasin' rights. To
you this is just so much rock and grama grass. You'll never do anything with it. I need it.'
'I told you, it's not for sale.'
'You know, we're goin' to put six, seven more wells on your place.'
'I don't think you are.'
'Now, Paul! Law's the law. Name your price—sixty dollars an acre? Eighty dollars?'
Rusk was unable to swing a deal, and some days after he had sent his men up to the tank to start a new well on the Yeager land, they came roaring back with a horrendous story: 'Like you ordered, we was headed for the north end of the Yeager lease, but he met us at the gate with a shotgun. We said "We got legal right" and he said "No more laws. You come on my land, I shoot." So we drove right in, as you said to do, and by God, he shot.'
'Kill anybody?'
'Elmer's hurt bad. Doctor's tendin' him.'
In gargantuan fury Floyd Rusk rampaged around town looking for the sheriff, and after he found him, a posse drove north to handle Paul Yeager. They found him standing at the gate to his ranch, shotgun still in hand.
'Don't come in here!' he warned.
'Paul, the law says—'
'Stand back, Fat Belly. No more of your trucks on my land.'
'Yeager!' the sheriff shouted. 'Put down that gun and—'
Yeager fired, not at the sheriff but at Rusk, who with extraordinary nimbleness dropped to the ground, whipped out his Colts, and drilled his brother-in-law through the head.
There were seventeen witnesses, of course, to testify that Paul Yeager had aimed a shotgun at the sheriff and had nearly killed Floyd Rusk, who had fired back in self-defense. No trial was ever held, and after the burial Rusk asked the sheriff to ride out to the Yeager ranch and offer Mrs. Yeager a good price for her lands without saying who the bidder was. Before the month was out, Rusk had regained the land his father should never have given away, and the Rusk rigs were free to move about it as they wished.
